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In the 1960s Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram famously carried out a series of experiments that forever changed our perceptions of morality and free will. The subjects-or "teachers"-were instructed to administer electroshocks to a human "learner," with the shocks becoming progressively more powerful and painful.

Controversial but now strongly vindicated by the scientific community, these experiments attempted to determine to what extent people will obey orders from authority figures regardless of consequences. Milgram's book is one well worth the effort. It reveals an element of human being that is so easy to forget, especially given that our culture is so bent on denying any element of - or at least any potential for - evil within ourselves.

Obedience to Authority is Milgram's fascinating and troubling chronicle of his classic study and a vivid and persuasive explanation of his conclusions.

''... one of the most significant books I have read in more than two decades of reviewing" -Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times

Stanley Milgram taught social psychology at Yale University and Harvard University before becoming a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His honors and awards include a Ford Foundation fellowship, an American Association for the Advancement of Science Socio-Psychological prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship. He died in 1984 at the age of fifty-one. Philip Zimbardo is a professor emeritus at Stanford University. The author of The Lucifer Effect, he is known for the famous Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971.